Category: Interview Series

Shane Hastie, Director of Agile Learning Programs for ICAgile, conversed with us about his ideas on significance of Agile Leadership in the age of digital disruption.

He has shared valuable thoughts around what are the essential behaviours of an Agile Leader that can drive success. Let’s read;

Q1. Why is Business Agility being talked about so much these days?

Shane: The pace of change is increasing and the management approaches which were effective in the 19th and 21th centuries are no longer applicable today.  The pressures on organisations mean we need to find new ways of working in order to remain relevant in this new age. Customers are more demanding, employees expect to be treated with respect and valued for their unique contributions not as mere “resources”, society requires that organisations be good corporate citizens and governments are responding to the pressures from their citizens. Business Agility is the capacity and willingness of an organization to adapt to, create, and leverage change for their customer’s benefit.  Every organisation today needs to be agile in all aspects of their operations – it’s necessary

Q2. According to you how important is it to shift from reactive mind to creative mind to lead an Agile transformation?

Shane: Carol Dweck gave us the ideas about fixed and growth mindset and it is absolutely clear that to enable and lead change in organisations a growth/learning/adaptive mindset is crucial.  Fixed/reactive mindsets resist change and fatally sabotage adoption of new ways of thinking and working in organisations.

Q3. Please share your view on Agile Leadership in the age of Digital Disruption?

Shane: In the digital age, the old ideas of leadership are no longer valid.  Command and control, hierarchies and many layers of authority get in the way of responding to customers needs and producing value quickly, so leaders need to take a completely different view of their roles. The need different skill-sets and attitudes from what was the norm in the industrial age.  Leaders need to focus on building community, fostering collaboration, removing obstacles and creating environments where people are empowered to achieve the organisation’s goals.  

Leaders need to facilitate learning, inspire creativity, communicate a compelling vision and provide their people with the support they need to be successful.

The Agile Manifesto states:

Build projects around motivated individuals.

Give them the environment and support they need,

and trust them to get the job done.

This is not an easy shift for a traditional leader, but it is an absolutely essential one.

Q4. What are the essential behaviours of an Agile Leader?

Shane: First and foremost agile leaders need to be role models – they need to live and breath the principles of agility; respect for people, continuous learning, customer focus and organisational sustainability.

An agile leader is a coach and mentor, helping their followers to become the best possible versions of themselves.  

They convey a clear mission and purpose that followers can align around.  They delegate outcomes not activities and they ensure that their people are both enabled and empowered to achieve the outcomes.

They create conditions of psychological safety through being vulnerable, admitting their own mistakes, seeking feedback and constantly learning.

Q5. What are the signs that your strategy as a Leader isn’t working? What is next once identified?

Shane: Any time you find yourself telling someone what to do and how to do it, you’ve disempowered them.  Start from the assumption that your people want to do a great job and your role is to enable them to do so.  If skills are lacking then provide skills training, if knowledge is not there then find ways to share it with them. Daniel Pink talks about the three big motivators for knowledge workers – autonomy, mastery and purpose.  Ask yourself what has happened to remove or reduce one of these motivators and take steps to correct that loss.

Q6. Where do you see Agile Community heading in 2019?

Shane: Agile software development is now the prevalent approach for building software intensive systems, there is no longer a discussion about should we adopt agile in the IT space.

The big moves that are happening now are the recognition that these ideas are also applicable in areas beyond software development.

Any organisation can benefit from an agile mindset and approach.  Removing bottlenecks, empowering people and delighting customers result in more profitable and sustainable businesses.

Areas that have been blockers and bottlenecks to change are beginning to come along on the agile journey – people operations, finance and marketing are three areas where business agility is starting to take hold, and the results can be amazing in terms of unleashing the creativity and productivity in the rest of the organisation.

Q7. One questions you think I should have asked you. Please answer the same as well.

Shane: The Question:  Why did you write the book #NoProjects?

Answer: The project paradigm is fundamentally broken, it doesn’t fit for most knowledge worker initiatives and results in huge levels of waste – of time, money, manpower and motivation. Moving beyond projects and thinking about long-lived, products or services brings a radically different viewpoint to the work and results in better outcomes for everyone involved.

Shane Hastie is the Director of Agile Learning Programs for ICAgile.Over the last 30+ years Shane has been a practitioner and leader of developers, testers, trainers, project managers and business analysts, helping teams to deliver results that align with overall business objectives. He has worked with large and small organisations, from individual teams to large transformations all around the world. He draws on over 30 years of practical experience across all levels of Information Technology and software intensive product development. Shane was a director of the Agile Alliance from 2011 to 2016 and is the founding Chair of Agile Alliance New Zealand.

In the April 2019 edition, we conversed with Janice Linden-Reed to understand her experience on challenges of implementing change and approaches to change management.

She explained how organisations consider change initiatives as more work and how lack of trust turns out to be a big challenge. Let’s read her insights;

Q1. As per your experience what are the difficulties to implement any change?

Janice: There are different types of change. There are small, gradual changes, such as the evolutionary change you get with the Kanban Method, and there are broader, systemic change initiatives. They each have their challenges, but the difficulty isn’t only about the size of the change.  It also involves the culture, maturity, and available capacity of the affected business unit.

The bottom line is that organizations are already so busy, and a change initiative feels like more work – and it is more work. It adds to the demand on the workers and takes capacity away from work items. Even worse, there is often a lack of trust that the change will ultimately be worth the effort.

Q2. Can change be co-created? Please share your thoughts?

Janice: Co-creation means getting all the relevant stakeholders together to discuss the proposed change and set desired outcomes. That is ideal, if you can accomplish it, because it gets everyone engaged. I often work with low maturity organizations and they are unlikely to carve out the time for this approach. In that case, you need a strong sponsor, such as an executive, who can frequently remind everyone that the change initiative is important and deserves their attention.

Q3. What are some effective approaches for Change Management?

Janice: For much of my career, I never thought of change management as something separate from project management.  Now I follow the ProSci ADKAR system which calls out change management initiatives specifically. It involves an assessment and plan up front to give the change initiative the best chance of succeeding.

Also, if you are working with individuals from various parts of the world, or with globally distributed offices, they may respond to change initiatives in ways you don’t expect due to cultural differences.  I am working with Erin Meyer’s Culture Mapping tools to consider several factors including differences in communication, trust and decision styles.

Q4. How do you define a Chronic Work Disorder? What are the ways to identify it?

Janice: A “Chronic Work Disorder” is what I call any frustrating issue that keeps happening such as shifting requirements or late delivery. It is like a disease that isn’t going away. The way to identify the issue – and resolve it – is to formally recognize that your work is a system with patterns and policies. Using the Kanban Method, you can create a model of that system, reveal the problem areas, and make small changes to improve it.

This is also a good way to improve business agility. By adjusting the model (the Kanban system), you can adjust the way you work to keep up with current market conditions.

Q5. Creating a culture of improvement is not an easy nut to crack. Please share your suggestions to achieve the same.

Janice: A culture of improvement is a culture of change. It requires an ongoing focus on learning and a willingness to devote time and energy (capacity) to try out frequent changes that address pain points. This is easier in an evolutionary change system because the changes are small, but it still requires that we specifically allocate a percentage of total capacity to experiment with improvements. It is an ongoing commitment.

Q6. Please highlight how awareness and implementation of change go hand-in-hand?

Janice: Awareness is essential, or you risk that the change initiative is abandoned, ignored, or implemented incorrectly.  Have an explicit plan for the implementation. Have a sponsor to communicate executive support. These are important but so is awareness of the core system.  It is amazing how often organizations launch into change without truly understanding the system they already have. Part of that system is the balance of demand and capacity.  Know if you have spare cycles before you take on a change initiative. Anything else is wishful thinking.

Janice Linden-Reed is principal and Senior Consultant at Ready Option (readyoption.com), an organization dedicated to improving the delivery of critical work in fields such as social impact, disaster management, and public policy. She is a former executive with Lean Kanban Inc. and has over 10 years’ experience using Kanban for knowledge work and service work, as well as building programs and the global community for trainers, coaches, and enthusiasts for the Kanban Method. She is based in Seattle, Washington and appears around the world doing public speaking and consulting. Janice is program chair for the Lean Kanban North America 2019 conference, part of the Lean Kanban Global Summit.